


It's (Redundantly) a Dark Night

by anticyclone



Category: Hocus Pocus (1993)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Halloween, Nighttime, Post-Canon, Zombies, graveyards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-26 02:07:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20922383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anticyclone/pseuds/anticyclone
Summary: Dani squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. "I need your help.""Is your bed on fire again?" Billy asked.Dani has ended up with a problem she really, really doesn't want to admit to having. And who better to keep her secrets - or to help - than a dead man?





	It's (Redundantly) a Dark Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Karios](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karios/gifts).

It was a dark, but not stormy, night.

Actually in Dani's experience most nights were dark. But as she slunk through the graveyard with a cloak pulled up over her head and a shovel strapped to her back, it seemed silly not to make some kind of observation about the environment.

So: It was a dark night. In a graveyard. In Salem. On Halloween.

The senior yearbook was not going to list Dani as "Best Decision Maker," anyway, so she figured she might as well go for it.

She'd waited until Halloween because her parents were guaranteed to spend the entire evening at the town hall ball, and because Allison's parents expected Allison and Max to spend at least the first part of the evening at their house.

No one expected moody, sulky Dani to go to parties full of adults. Everyone was just relieved she'd agreed to hand out candy and hadn't put up a fuss about wanting to throw a party of her own, like last year.

"Like I wanted to throw another party anyway," she said, finally at her destination. "The last one was a disaster. It was _my_ bed that got set on fire, I don't know why everybody was so worried I'd do it again."

She threw her hood down from her hair and spun in a slow circle to confirm there were no tourists hiding out in the graveyard either. Then she took the shovel off her back. And began to dig.

Ten minutes later she was covered in sweat, panting, and had thrown her costume cloak over Billy Butcherson's gravestone.

"How," she demanded, sticking the shovel into the dirt again, "did you dig yourself out of this? We knocked your head off like it was nothing. There is no way you had the upper body strength to get through all this dirt."

Billy did not answer. He hadn't answered her on any of the last full moons when she'd visited the graveyard, either. But Dani thought she had figured that out. None of the last full moons had been on Halloween. All she had to do to prove it was get through six damn feet of dirt. Her hands had started to hurt and her arms were burning. She had like, four more feet to go.

"Look, if you can hear me, if you could like, help?" she asked. She threw another shovelful of dirt over her shoulder. "Only if I don't get back to the house by eleven, Max and Allison will totally find out I skipped on handing out candy, and then I'm screwed."

Technically, and this was still the argument Dani planned on going with if she was caught, she had _not_ skipped out on handing out candy. She'd left a giant bowl of every bag of candy her parents had bought on the porch with a sign saying _Take just one!! >:(_ with a little sketch of a black cat underneath. In her opinion that was more than fulfilling her responsibility.

"I should've brought a water bottle." She stopped for a moment to lean her forehead against the shovel handle.

A second later a graying hand punched through the dirt at her feet.

Dani grinned. "Now we're talking."

The shovel was out, she couldn't risk hitting Billy. So she crawled up out of the hole and brushed the dirt off her jeans while Billy finished escaping his own grave. For the second time.

When his head was free, he levered himself up out of the dirt just enough to rest his elbows on the ground. "I was asleep!"

"I need your help."

Billy squinted. "I figured you would be taller by now," he told Dani, ignoring the way it made her stutter and choke. "I thought you said you wouldn't be doing any more magic."

"Wait, you could hear me? All that time? You never said anything!"

"Just because you couldn't hear me doesn't mean I didn't say anything."

"What did you say?"

"Not to mess with magic," Billy said, reasonably.

Dani held herself back from sticking out her tongue, because she was almost eighteen and that would be childish.

Waist free of the ground, Billy pushed until he was on his feet. Dani reached both hands out to him. Together they got him out of the hole. And even a long-dead zombie knew that standing next to an open gravesite in Salem on Halloween was suspicious. Dani grabbed her costume and Billy picked up the shovel.

"I never did magic, not really."

"Last November you told me you'd been grounded until Christmas because you set your bed on fire during a spell."

"That my friend cast!" Dani protested, pulling her cloak back on. "I was just trying to read a grimoire, I didn't want to actually cast a spell for instant light."

"No, you were trying to talk to ghosts." Billy's expression showed exactly what he thought of that.

Dani crossed her arms over her chest. They were halfway out of the graveyard. There was a stand of trees here that cast enough shadow to make them nearly invisible from the well-lit street. All the gravestones here were so old and weathered that Dani couldn't read them, not even in the light of day.

"I would have also used it to talk to you," she said, archly. "Or to hear you talk back, I guess."

"I'm not a ghost." Billy bent down - ugh, Dani really hadn't gotten any taller - and frowned. "Is that why you dug me up tonight?"

Dani lifted her chin. "No."

Billy's face had not gotten more flexible in the past ten years. She could tell he tried to raise one eyebrow at her, but he was too stiff, so both of them ended up going up. A tiny part of her worried about what would happen if she needed him in fifty years - but surely in fifty years she could've worked out one little, totally not evil talking-to-people-beyond-the-grave spell.

Even if he wasn't a ghost, when he was in the ground Billy was beyond the grave. Specifically, six feet beyond it. It could work. Dani was sure she could make it work, eventually.

Dani squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. "I need your help."

"Is your bed on fire again?" Billy asked.

"Ha. Ha. No. I-" She stopped, took another deep breath, and stopped again.

Billy put a hand on her shoulder. It wasn't warm or cold. It just felt oddly light, not really like Dani had remembered. Except that when she leaned into it she did feel better. That was a more familiar feeling. "I'm sure it's not the end of the world."

From the next look on his face, Dani was sure her smile was more of a grimace.

"It's just," she said, gulping. "I… found the book."

"The book?"

_"The_ book," Dani said. "I went into the basement of this weird used bookstore in town, I swear it never even had a basement before, and it was just … there. The guy sold it to me for five dollars. I think he thought it was a movie prop?"

Billy blinked. Then he leaned back. "Oh. Fuck."

"Billy!"

"What? I'm dead. I can say whatever I want."

"I can't figure out how to kill it!" Dani said, throwing her hands up. "It keeps _looking_ at me!"

Billy made a dismissive gesture with one hand and walked forward, toward the street. He threw the shovel over his shoulder. Luckily he didn't walk very fast, and Dani caught up with him easily. "We'll figure it out," he told her.

"Great. We have until eleven."

"Not morning? Or midnight?"

"If Max and Allison find out I've been keeping Winifred Sanderson's book in my stuffed animal storage hammock because I didn't want to tell them I'd been to the creepy occult bookstore again, they will kill me," Dani announced. "Even more than they would for going to the bookstore in the first place."

Billy grinned at her. It was a horrible grin, all dried flesh and missing teeth, and the sight of it after all this time made Dani smile back without thinking.

"Being dead isn't so bad," he said.

She elbowed him. But gently. She didn't know how to sew, and she didn't know what she'd do if his arm fell off. For the first time since she'd found the book, she was starting to think that maybe, she'd actually find a way to get rid of it.

On the walk home two different people complimented Billy on his 'zombie who dug himself out of his own grave' costume. They said the dirt on the shovel was a nice touch.


End file.
